Old Venus Read online

  I almost didn’t hear the girls’ answering shot, surely less than a mile away. I fired again, and listened carefully while I reloaded two fat cartridges. I yelled “Hello?” a couple of times at the top of my lungs.

  I went back to the shuttle’s stern. The primary blast nozzle was wider than I am tall, so nothing was likely to sneak up behind me. It was still radiating heat and creaking as it cooled, which might also discourage animals.

  Unless they thought That thing is lying still and squeaking helplessly …

  A voice I almost recognized shouted hello back to me. “Gloria?”

  She came out of the jungle and I stepped toward her and stopped.

  She looked like a very accurate cartoon. Sexy short-shorts and a halter top and bare feet. Bare feet? Walking in this jungle?

  Her clothes looked painted on and her hair was perfect, solid.

  “Gloria?”

  She repeated “Hello.” But her grinning mouth was full of long yellow spikes. Her muscles bunched to spring, and I fired twice.

  One bullet hit her knee, and the leap turned into a sprawl, that covered half the distance. She snarled at me, a hair-raising sound like a sheet being torn, and staggered back into the jungle—changing, as she went, into a creature that looked like a large cat crossed with an armadillo, armored shoulders and back. She left behind a spatter trail of bright blue blood.

  The xenobiologists were going to love this. Of course there were Terran animals that used mimicry, but I think in a more timid way, trying not to be eaten. I don’t think any of them try to talk.

  Getting back inside the shuttle sounded like a really good idea. Not an easy one to accomplish, though, without a ladder. The bottom of the door was almost at eye level, and I had last done gymnastics about thirty years ago. But with the help of healthy fear, I did manage on the second try to swing my right leg up high enough to hook a heel around the corner of the door and scramble up gracelessly, pulling a big muscle on the inside of my thigh.

  I limped straight back to the survival-gear bin and hauled out the big machine gun. Four heavy magazines that held fifty rounds each. It was set up to fire bursts of four. So I could tap the trigger fifty times. Or just hose it around until the noise stopped. Reload and hose some more.

  Up in the temperate-zone base, they had a noisemaker that made loud random bangs every minute or so, which kept the fauna away from the perimeter pretty well. Should I do that here? It might have the opposite effect, attracting curious flesh-eaters.

  I sat there listening to the jungle and trying to access the young and foolish man I had been thirty years ago. Man-eating creatures with big yellow teeth? Hey, just give me a gun.

  Now it’s sort of “give me a transfer.” We grow too soon old, my grandmother used to say, and too late smart.

  There was a noise at the edge of the clearing. I raised the weapon and realized that I didn’t know what the drop was set for. Aim high or low? Well, I wasn’t that good a shot anyhow.

  The woman who came out was not half-naked and was not Gloria. She took one look at me and screamed.

  I lowered the rifle. “Sorry!” Waved at her. “Get in the ship! There’s a wounded animal out there.”

  Three of them followed her, sprinting across the sand; the others hobbling along as one five-legged limping beast. Gloria was trying to hop on one good leg, supported by two other women. Her leg gave out while I was watching.

  I slid down, keeping the rifle pointed at the jungle. “What happened?” Gloria didn’t respond.

  “Some goddamned thing bit her,” another of the women said. Gloria was barely conscious, pale as snow except for the leg, angry red up past the knee, puffy with streaks of black. “Is it gangrene?” the woman whispered. She had a Texas accent and her name patch said LARAMIE.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” Gangrene was just a word to me, something that happened to people in old novels. This was probably something worse, something Venusian.

  In novels, the choice was always between amputation and death.

  “I have a diagnostic suite,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t designed to survive a crash landing.”

  “You weren’t, either,” a tiny woman said, “but here you are. Let’s get her up there.”

  It was a clumsy business, me hauling from above while the two taller women pushed from below. She cried out, then moaned and passed out, her eyes rolling up.

  Laramie was tall enough to lever herself aboard the way I had, and together we laid Gloria down gently on the cot that unfolded under the diagnostic machine. She was some sort of medical specialist, a caduceus patch on her blouse. She rapped on the two output screens and they stayed dark, ignoring her authority.

  Its ON switch didn’t do anything, even though it was properly set in the auxiliary-power position. Well, the lights on the same circuit were dim. Maybe the machine required full power or nothing would happen.

  I got a neomorphine pad out of the kit, but the nurse Laramie stopped me from tearing it open. “Better not,” the short one said. “She’s had more than a double dose already. Doesn’t seem to do anything.”

  They tried to undress her, but the swelling made it impossible. I found some shears in the toolbox that could just barely cut through her suit fabric, which was reinforced by some strong plastic thread.

  Taking turns, the three of us managed to cut a ragged line around the leg of her suit just below the crotch, and then snip down from there to the swelling. She woke enough to moan, shaking her head from side to side. I tried to say reassuring things, but she wasn’t hearing them.

  Her jaws clenched against screaming, she squeezed my hand hard enough to make the knuckles pop.

  We snipped down far enough to relieve the local swelling, but that didn’t seem to reduce the pain.

  “She’s fighting something our bodies have no defense against,” the medic said. “I don’t know …”

  Gloria cried out, back arched, then her body suddenly relaxed. Her eyes closed and she sagged into stillness.

  “Shit,” the medic said quietly. She pressed two fingers under Gloria’s chin. “She does have a pulse.” She rapped the machine again, harder.

  I got a multimeter out of the tool kit and checked a couple of connections. Exactly half of the power-cell elements were dead. I unscrewed the top of the battery box and ducked away from the sharp smell of formic acid.

  “Here’s the problem.” I pointed to where the bottom three elements shared a wide crack, which oozed purple solute.

  “You can’t fix them?” the small woman said.

  “Not even in a shop, no,” I said. “On Earth, you’d just switch out the ruined elements. Even on Mars.” I picked up a dirty shirt and wiped the acid away from the crack with it and stared and thought. “Your own electrical system is out, completely out?”

  “I don’t know about ‘complete.’ The ship’s dark,” the medic said.

  “What about this part?” I tapped with the wrench. “The fuel cells?”

  “I guess it’s pretty much junk,” she said. “It’s all crushed and … and …”

  “Julie’s body’s in there,” Laramie said. “Stuck there. We couldn’t get her out.”

  “We didn’t really try,” the short one said. “No chance she survived.”

  Sounded grim enough. “No chance at all?”

  “Head crushed,” Laramie said, her voice husky. “And a lot more.”

  “Could you see the control console? I mean … is it possible the power cells are intact?”

  They looked at each other and shook their heads. “Couldn’t see in,” the medic said. “Didn’t go too far in.”

  “She was … all over the place,” the little one said. “We had the communicator out, and the canteens, and didn’t want to go back in if we could help it. We called you guys and they said you’d get here in an hour or so.”

  In their dreams. But I checked my watch and was surprised to see that only a couple of hours had passed since I took off.<
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  I looked down in the direction they’d come from. “How far is the ship?”

  “Maybe ten minutes down the trail,” Laramie said.

  “It’s an actual trail?”

  She nodded. “Easy going.”

  “You didn’t cut it?”

  “Huh-uh … it was just there.”

  That wasn’t good. In the absence of people, it had to be a game trail. The planet had lots of herbivores, harmless enough in themselves. But the animals they were game for could be a problem. Probably one’s last problem.

  I rummaged through the toolbox and selected the biggest screwdriver and some heavy metal shears, the kind that uses a heavy spring to magnify its force. A flashlight. Still one empty pocket in my fatigues. I wished for a grenade.

  “What, you’re going back there?” the medic said.

  “Guess I have to. You see an alternative?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Laramie said. “You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Just give me the damned pistol and let’s get going.”

  No place for chivalry here. I handed it to her and picked up the machine gun with an extra magazine. “You all stay inside here.” As if anyone would go out for a stroll without a handy machine gun. I hopped to the ground and jacked a round into the chamber. Scanned the jungle line and gave Laramie a hand down.

  “Back the way we came?” she said.

  “Might as well.” If we tried to beat a new way through the jungle, the noise might draw attention. Though the rain was pounding down pretty hard.

  We were about a minute down the trail when we ran into our first fauna. It might have been a big green rock, to a casual observer. But six stubby, scaled legs appeared underneath it, and a large head craned out, bigger than a human head and sporting a bright yellow beak and bulging sky-blue eyes. A black wattle on the sides of the beak, and a crown of unruly black hair. Gills flaring, bright pink.

  It hissed and tipped back, reaching out with two front legs—arms—that sported glittering black talons.

  I fired once and the bullet spanged off its shell, apparently to no effect. I aimed for the head, but by then it was gone. Moving way too fast, for a turtle-ish thing the size of a small car.

  It left behind a smell like burned chocolate.

  “Ever see one of those?”

  “Not so close,” she said in a small voice. “Sometimes we’d see them watching from a distance, smell them. But we never caught one.”

  “Probably a good thing. It’s aquatic?”

  “We first saw them in the ocean.”

  “Wish they’d stay there.” The sound of the shot, though, might have chased them away, back to the water. Or they were hiding, lying in wait.

  We hustled down the path, swatting at bugs occasionally, but the biggest animals we saw were about cat-sized. Or armadillo-sized; they all had shells. They didn’t attack, but they didn’t run away, either.

  I smelled the wreck before I saw it. A wartime smell no one ever forgets. I swallowed back bile and Laramie bent over and puked.

  She coughed a few times. “God. We haven’t been gone that long.”

  The scientist in me followed the same thread. How long does it take for a hundred-some pounds of meat to decompose that much? I knew from a unit in forensic medicine that it should take all day, or more, even in this heat. Even with a body that had been squashed? That would speed things up.

  “Probably some Venusian microorganism,” she said hoarsely. That made me feel queasy. Whatever it was, I was breathing it. We went around a long curve and found the wreck.

  This ship was never going anywhere again. A big tree had crushed it between its reactor and fuel tanks, faint smell of hydrazine on top of the stench.

  The ramp up was twisted and it creaked under our weight. We went up slowly, deliberately, not eager to get there.

  Julie had been beautiful. Now her face was gone. Every place skin had been exposed was a mass of red and orange cilia, wriggling. Her body smelled of molasses and decay. Laramie edged around it without comment.

  The smell was different from my memory of corpses on Earth, when I’d been an unarmed medic in a short war. Burial detail. This was less pungent, perhaps sweeter, perhaps more like mold. Most of mine had been dead for some while, though.

  My feet didn’t want to move. I couldn’t take my eyes off the nightmare. I hadn’t known her that well, but we had flirted in a joking way back at Farside a couple of years ago. The mouth I’d kissed good-bye was grey bone now and too-white teeth.

  “We don’t have all day,” Laramie said gently.

  There were no lights inside the wreck, but I had a small penlight. Fortunately, the pilot controls were old-style, almost identical to the ones I’d trained on.

  I unscrewed the access panel and held my breath when I touched the fuel-cell terminals with the two multimeter probes. Twenty-three volts, plenty.

  “Think we’re okay.” I had to use the shears to free the fuel cell, doing maybe ten thousand credits’ damage. Send the bill to fucking Venus.

  It weighed less than thirty pounds, clumsy rather than heavy. But I only had one free arm now. “Take this,” I said, and traded her the rifle for the pistol. “You better lead.”

  By the time we inched past, the corpse was totally covered with the colorful worms, writhing more slowly. Nothing human visible. You couldn’t even see bones anymore.

  The smell was gone.

  “Same way?” she asked as we stepped carefully down the ramp.

  “Yeah. What happened to the smell?”

  “Nothing left to generate decomposition gases, I suppose.” She shook her head. “In just a few minutes, Jesus. Fast work.”

  We had company before we reached the bottom of the ramp. A crawling horror about the size of a man was waiting patiently. A chimera with head and arms but no legs, just a long, tapering body, shiny with bright yellow scales. Three eyes that looked old and wise, over a red mouth dripping saliva. A grin full of sharp teeth. We both fired and missed, and it squirmed away. My second shot hit its tail. It wailed like an oboe with a bad reed, and it rose up to stare back at us malevolently before it ducked under my third shot.

  “Get back in the ship?” Laramie said in a quavering voice.

  “I don’t think so. If we can’t raise the ramp or close the door, we’re gonna just be dinner, as soon as it gets dark. Have to get back to my ship.”

  We were at the edge of the ramp when something moved in the brush in front of us. “Christ!”

  It also looked about man-sized, but then raised itself up on a combination of arms and tentacles. Dark blue and shiny and higher than my head.

  I fired and missed; fired again and hit it square. It opened its mouth—bright red tongue and shark teeth—and said “Oh! Oh!” in a loud bass growl.

  Laramie was pulling the trigger over and over, to no effect. “Arming lever!” I said. “Cock it!”

  “No!” the beast said. “No! Don’t cock!” Two spindly arms, like a tyrannosaurus, raised up. My last bullet took an arm off at the elbow.

  It howled in pain. “I said No! Don’t! Don’t shoot. Me.”

  A pink tentacle wormed out of the arm stump. It turned dark blue, curling, then flexed and became a new arm. “See?”

  Laramie lowered her weapon. “Are you … talking to us?”

  “Yes! Trying! Talk! To talk.”

  I left my finger on the trigger but didn’t pull it. I looked at the beast over the pistol sights. “You can talk?”

  “Yes! Not good!” The new arm had completely regrown. The creature studied it from a couple of angles. “Don’t do that again! That hurts!” It picked up the severed limb and sniffed it, and then swallowed it in two horrible bites.

  “Taste,” it said. “A man should taste …” It shook its head violently. “A man should share, no.” It looked at its new hand. “Pain. Peril. A man should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being.” It ope
ned its jaws wide, with a loud cracking sound, then sat back and cleared its throat.

  “ ‘A man should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1884 Old Style. May 30.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “D-juh, d-joo, Julie. I know what Julie had. Has. In her brain.” It nodded slowly. “Had in her brain at the time that she joined me.”

  “Because you ate her?” I said. “Ate her brain? Jesus!”

  “No, no!” It shook its head violently, spraying tendrils of saliva. “Because … ‘because’ is hard. Itself.”

  “Riddles,” I said, and tightened my grip on the gun.

  “Wait,” Laramie said. “You mean ‘because,’ like, causality? That’s hard?”

  “Yes.” The beast’s gaze swiveled to her. “Causality is not simple. I am her. When Julie died here, she became part of here. Part of Venus. And so part of me. She will always be.”

  It looked back at me, huge blue eyes. “Everything. Every worm, every microorganism that ever died on Venus is part of Venus, forever. It’s different from Earth and Mars, I think.” I heard a step behind me, and turned.

  It was Julie, my Julie. Naked, whole, unharmed. Next to her, Gloria. Also naked, leg completely healed.

  “Dying is not the same here, darling,” Julie said, and shrugged. “Not so permanent.”

  I fainted dead away.

  —–—

  The science of it is still not clear, to put it mildly. If it even is science.

  The Venusian I tried to kill had “sort of” died dozens of times, in the centuries of life it remembered. For a Venusian to actually die, for keeps, it takes something catastrophic, like a fire. Otherwise, it will go through a rejuvenating process like the grisly transformation we had seen starting with Julie’s body. “Food for worms” doesn’t mean the same thing as on Earth.

  There’s a lot that doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. Astronomy, biology, cosmology, just to start down the alphabet. If a planet can be sentient, what do you redefine? Planets or sentience? It has to be both, and everything.